rsync problem with symbolic links on Cygwin - Tools

This is a discussion on rsync problem with symbolic links on Cygwin - Tools ; Dear rsync maintainers,
Hi, I have been seeing a problem for awhile in an rsync script I
maintain with how rsync syncs symbolic links between and rsync daemon
running on Linux and an rsync client running on recent Cygwin that ...

rsync problem with symbolic links on Cygwin

Dear rsync maintainers,

Hi, I have been seeing a problem for awhile in an rsync script I
maintain with how rsync syncs symbolic links between and rsync daemon
running on Linux and an rsync client running on recent Cygwin that I
am wondering is a known issue. Basically rsync always copies symbolic
links, even when they already exist on the destination. I run rsync
multiple times, with the source not changing between runs, and rsync
copies symbolic links every time.

In looking into this issue it appears to me it is related to the way
Cygwin creates symbolic links. By default Cygwin has for awhile
created symbolic links as Windows shortcuts, which results in '.lnk'
being appended to the symbolic link file name on the Windows volume
(although Cygwin ls will hide this extension). I suspect this causes
rsync to think the symbolic link does not exist on the destination and
recopy it.

Cygwin has an 'nowinsymlinks' env var switch to revert it symbolic
link behavior to its previous default of creating symbolic links as
UNIX links (see "How do symbolic links work?" at http://cygwin.com/faq.html)
, and one can easily confirm this env var works correctly with the ln -
s command in the Cygwin shell. However, this env var seems to have no
effect on rsync. I tried setting it in both my script and also as a
Windows environment variable, and neither had any effect on this
problem.

Is rsync somehow ignoring the 'nowinsymlinks' env var, or does the
method that it uses to create symbolic links not respect this env var
on Cygwin? I looked briefly at the rsync 3.0.3 source and it did not
appear to me that rsync alters this env var.

I see this problem with both rsync 2.6.9 and rsync 3.0.3 on Cygwin.
The Linux rsync daemon is running rsync 2.6.9.